5th Sunday of Ordinary Time, B February 4, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
What’s your price? What would it cost someone to convince you to proclaim the gospel to them? In the second reading, St. Paul says he offers the gospel free of charge. Of course, it’s his job: “an obligation has been imposed” on him to preach the gospel. Yet, even though he has the right to be paid for this job but he refuses to accept money from the people he’s preaching to. Why? Because he wants them to see it’s not about the paycheck, but the very mission of love itself.
So, what about you? You may not be an apostle like Paul, but you do have “an obligation… imposed” on you. When you were baptized, you were anointed with holy oil to mark you as a priest, prophet, and king in Jesus Christ. Everyone who is baptized shares in Jesus’ priesthood. I am a ministerial priest, but I was first a baptismal priest just like everyone who is baptized. You are priests. That’s why, as everyone knows, Catholics have an obligation to go to Mass every Sunday. It’s part of our priestly responsibility.
You are also kings, royalty in Jesus Christ. That’s why, as everyone knows, Catholics are obligated to control themselves and follow the commandments. We show our kingly or queenly dignity through righteous and holy living.
But the one we keep seeming to forget is that prophetic office. As the Catechism puts it, all lay people have the “duty… to fulfill their prophetic mission by evangelization.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but Paul implies that if he does not proclaim the gospel, then he could lose his own share in that gospel – if we aren’t trying to give it away to others, we don’t get to keep it for ourselves either. That could mean hell.
Yes, God is just and demanding, but also generous and loving. It’s not all threats and punishment. Indeed, it’s much more about the reward and the promise of joyful love. I didn’t become a priest because I was afraid of going to hell if I said no, but because I was attracted to the reward, to the “recompense” as St. Paul put it.
So, what’s your price? Jesus tells his apostles that everyone who gives up things in this life to serve him will receive them back a hundred times more plus eternal life. For St. Paul, however, that promise of God’s glory and life was so attractive that he freely turned down other rewards just to focus on that one all the more.
But I’m no St. Paul. Neither are you. So what’s your price? What would motivate you to proclaim the gospel to someone? If someone offered to pay you $10/hour to proclaim the gospel to them, would that be enough? If they offered you food or drink or a place to stay, would you tell them about Jesus then?
Or are your requirements more immaterial? Is your price friendship or blood? How close does someone have to get to you, how much trust and affection from another person would it take for you to share the gospel with them? What cultural common ground do you want from them first? What sort of ancestry would qualify them to receive from you the gift of God’s word? What racial features would make you more likely to bestow upon someone this great treasure? What political support do you need from them in exchange for the service of evangelizing them? How much success and fame do you expect to receive in exchange for fulfilling your prophetic obligations?
Jesus himself was “rewarded” for his mission. Powerful people seek him out. The gospel tells us that wealthy women provided for his needs. We see expensive things “wasted” on his behalf because of who he is and what he does. But consider how he responds to these “payments” for his work. Just as he begins to become “famous” in Capernaum, does he stop to collect and enjoy his recompense?
No. “For this purpose I have come,” he tells us, “that I may preach.” Most people work to make money – and that’s fine. But Jesus does not preach in order to be rewarded. No, the preaching is the goal. The reward, the “payment” for that preaching? It only matters inasmuch as it helps the goal. And when the payments stop, when we have moments like Job, when Christ’s reward is execution, faith carries on.
Scripture, St. Paul, St. James, Jesus himself all use the language of reward and payment because that is part of how human beings are motivated. Yet, like master teachers, they seek to move their disciples from the level of external motivation to the very heart of what moves human beings… to draw us into a place of lasting peace and integrity… to make us more fully ourselves by rooting our motivations in the very source of motivation itself: love.
Our God, who is love, offers many good things. Yet, they are all but shadows of the reflection of goodness itself. Perhaps you’re hearing this homily thinking I want you to “lower your price” for evangelizing or to pressure you into doing more work for less reward. The truth is the opposite… I want to convince you not to settle for anything less than the very source of what “reward” even means.
By keeping the gospel as a private matter or treating it like a commodity to be traded, we lose the ability to even gauge value. God does not often make millionaires of his apostles as a reward for their evangelization. What he does is reveal to them how they already possess changes the very definition of value. The rest is lagniappe.
So, what is your price? Whether you realize it or not, your price is love. What you do, who you become, where you go – all are decided by what you love. To do nothing, be no one, and never go anywhere – love this world and the all the things of it: money, pleasure, fame, comfort. To do all things, become all things, and go on forever – love God.
Loving God is something we do or don’t do with every choice we make. Loving God follows as many paths as there are people. Yet, loving God always depends on two fundamental choices: to choose to accept his un-earned love for you, and, without trying to make them earn it first, choose to proclaim that love to everyone else.